As part of our work in Tuist, we have to put a lot of thinking into how the Tuist is presented as a product. As developers, we might think that it's just a matter of solving a problem or a bunch of problems, and putting them under an umbrella name along with documentation and a website. However, when I think of the products that I love and use every day, all of them have something in common: they tell stories.

Humans love stories. Stories bring us together. Capitalism, democracy, and religion are all stories that we tell ourselves. We need stories to identify ourselves with, and developer tools are no exception.

But what's Tuist story you might wonder? At first, Tuist was a solution to a problem: Xcode projects are hard to maintain. We didn't have a story back then, but organizations felt so much pain working with Xcode, that the pain led to the adoption of Tuist. And we kept adding on top of that, so as you can imagine, the story was not clear. What is Tuist? A project generator? A project generator and a Fastlane? A CLI for automation? A tool to optimize the development experience?

When there's no story, or the story is not clear, people don't know how to identify themselves with the product. Note that I prefer to talk about people and not users because the term users dehumanizes the relationship between the product and the people using it.

So for the past few months, I've been thinking about what the story of Tuist should be, and I'm starting to see it. The common denominator of all the features we've been adding is that we want to make developers happier and more productive. We believe this leads to better apps. We also believe there's a possibility to take this to other platforms, but as of today, that feels more like a new chapter in the story.

But "happiness" and "productivity" feel too abstract. I'm already happy with my Xcode project. I don't need you. It's very natural to feel that way. Hence why we are presenting it as something developers are familiar with. We aim to become a virtual platform team. Or like the AI jargon likes to say: a copilot.

But that's not enough. By talking about platform teams, developers might have a vague idea of the role that Tuist plays, but how do you present the features? Are you going to say that you are just providing tools X, Y, and Z where X, Y, and Z are just some random marketing names that you came up with but that mean nothing to the developer? That doesn't sound like a good idea.

It's already an effort for developers to understand what a virtual platform team means, so we shouldn't add to that. Therefore, we are going to build on stories and mental models that developers are already familiar with. We are going to use the same terminology that developers use, and place them in various phases of the app development lifecycle: start, build, share, and measure.

You don't need to explain what those are. Every developer, even non-Apple developers should be familiar with them. Tuist is just integrating into mental models to increase the level of happiness and productivity.

So we are currently in the process of iterating in the story or coming up with one since I wouldn't say we had a well-defined one before. And going forward, we are going to make sure we treat it as a dynamic organism that evolves with the product and the people using it. I'm very excited about this new chapter, and all the possibilities that it opens up.